POLYNESIAN RESEARCHES. 
43 
of the worlds including waters^ 8>cc., by the procreative 
power of their god. The Braminical account is^ that 
^^He (i. e. the divine Being) having willed to produce 
various beings from his own Divine substance^ firsts 
with a thought, created the waters, and placed in them 
a productive seed. That seed became an egg, bright as 
goldj blazing like the luminary with a thousand beams, 
and in that egg he was born himself, in the form of 
Brama, the great forefather of all spirits. The waters 
were called nara, because they were the production of 
narau, the spirit of God; and since they were his first 
ayana, or place of motion, he is thence named Narayanay 
or moving in the waters. In the egg the great power 
sat inactive a whole year (of the creator;) at the close 
of which, by his thought alone, he caused the egg to 
divide itself. From its two divisions he formed the 
heavens (above) and the earth (beneath)’^ &c. It is 
impossible to avoid noticing the identity of this account, 
contained in one of the ancient writings of the Bramins, 
with the ruder version of the same legend in the 
tradition prevailing in the Sandwich Islands, that the 
islands were produced by a bird, a frequent emblem of 
deity, a medium through which the gods often com¬ 
municated with men; who laid an egg upon the waters, 
which afterwards burst of itself, and produced the 
islands; especially, if with this we connect the appen¬ 
dages Tahitian tradition furnishes, that at first the 
heavens joined the earth, and were only separated by 
the tevay an insignificant plant, draconitum pollyphillumy 
till their god, Ruu, lifted up the heavens from the earth. 
The same event is recorded in one of their songs, in the 
following line: 
' Na Ruu i to te rai. 
Ruu did elevate or raise the heavens. 
